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Wikipedia: English Wikipedia
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Wikipedia.org is the largest GFDL access point. It suffers from a combination of software deficiencies and a developer and sysop power structure that is the opposite of democratic, and strongly favours insiders over outsiders. It is generally run better in the 22 languages other than English, since the guiltiest parties actually can't read those languages. The GodKing, Jimmy Wales, can't read or write any language other than English. This is probably good:
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As the largest Wikipedia edition, and because the English language is such a widely used language, the English Wikipedia draws many users and editors whose native language is not English. Such users seek information from the English Wikipedia rather than the Wikipedia of their native language simply because the English Wikipedia contains more information. Many successful collaborations have developed between non-native English speakers who add content to English Wikipedia and native English speakers who act as copy editors for those adding content.
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As of September 2007, Wikipedia had approximately 8.29 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.41 billion words for all Wikipedias. The English Wikipedia edition passed the 2,000,000 article mark on September 9 2007, and as of October 14 2007 it had over 2,047,000 articles consisting of over 890,000,000 words.[1] Wikipedia's articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and the vast majority of them can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Steadily rising in popularity since its inception,[3] it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.[4]
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Wikipedia ... has serious failings as an encyclopedia. There is no special process or mechanism to deal with a political dispute, with factions that can't or won't reconcile their terms to each other, and it explicitly has refused to work out any separate policy for terminology dispute or for an identity dispute, despite these being quite clearly all different things with different paths to resolution - or not. There are no designated editors to make final decisions, in any language, instead this is a power struggle of sorts, with a GodKing who speaks only English and can't possibly read all the disputed articles or judge their content. He works on "reputation" alone ultimately, which means the power structure is strictly hierarchical etc..
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Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed by a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.[17]
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Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia began as an English language project but quickly became a multilingual enterprise. Committed to maintaining neutrality, Wikipedia encourages contributors to fairly present all views on an issue, and welcomes participation of users from across the globe in order to neutralize the possibility of built-in biases derived from the demographic makeup of the contributors. Entries that are likely to contain controversial content are flagged as such, and it is occasionally necessary to freeze the option of editing certain topics when their neutrality is being compromised.
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English Wikipedia